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During the Mid-Autumn festival, it is customary to eat mooncakes (月饼) while drinking tea and admiring the moon. Mooncakes are essentially pastries that are filled with lotus seed paste, red bean paste or mung bean paste and a salted duck egg yolk. It is said to originate during one of the dynasties to ensure that a secret message to coordinate a rebellion were hidden as a message in the mooncakes.

This was practiced by my informant ever since he could eat solid food. It has been part of Chinese culture since at least the Yuan dynasty. However, this practice has been becoming less frequent due to the fact that one of the essential ingredients to making traditional mooncakes is lard; and in today’s health conscious society not many people would like to eat something so very fattening.

Even though mooncakes are a very traditional sort of food, it has begun to change in the last couple of years. Now, there are all sorts of mooncakes made with all sorts of flavors and materials. In Asia, Hagen Daaz sells chocolate coated, ice cream filled mooncakes and in recent years, there have been snow-skin mooncakes with the outer ‘skin’ being made out of glutinous rice paste.

It is interesting that the mooncakes have changed so much in the recent days with the introduction of more varieties in fillings and crusts. There are even mooncakes for the heart healthy because as mentioned above, many people now don’t want to eat fattening mooncakes.

When the groom and his entourage comes to the brides home to collect the bride, the bridesmaids lock the front door and refuse to allow the groom or his groomsmen entry to pick up the bride until they pay a small sum. Usually, the amount of money paid is an auspicious number, like 88 or 888 or 999. The haggling is usually done between the groomsmen and the bridesmaid, and the bride and groom themselves hardly ever participate in this exchange.

This was first introduced to my informant at her cousin’s wedding when she was about eight during the sixties. It is not known to my informant whether all Chinese perform this particular custom or just Chinese in the Singapore/Malayan peninsula.

The numbers are ‘lucky’ or auspicious because of what these numbers sound like in Chinese. For example, the number 8 in Chinese sounds like the word for strike it rich, while the number 9, bears phonetic similarities to the word for a long period of time. Therefore , it starts the wedding ceremony off with a good start.

Customarily this is to ensure a happy start to the wedding because with the exchange of money, this is the ‘modern’ version of ‘purchasing’ the bride from one family and bringing her into another. Even though this tradition is rarely seen nowadays, as Church weddings and Western culture is pervading more of the lives of younger Chinese.

A childhood game, played primarily by girls with five small cloth ‘stones’ that are either filled with sands or beans. Game involves throwing and catching the ‘stones’ while not touch the other. There are five stages to this games, the first stage is when you take one stone and throw it up in the air while snatching one on the ground without touching any of the other stones, and then catch the one that you threw up in the air. If you touched any other ‘stone’ or missed the falling ‘stone’ you’d lose your turn. This goes on till the fifth round, which you have all five in your hand and you toss all five in the air, flip your hand and catch it on the back of your hand. Additionally, with two or more people, the other player gets to choose the ‘stone’ that you need to throw up in the air.

My informant started playing this game when she was about six, growing up in Singapore during the early sixties. She played this game mainly because it was what girls that age did during that time, the boys played their games and the girls played theirs.

There are variations on the rules depending on what school you went to and who you played with and they are mostly about which hand to play with after the first whole round and the fifth stage. While there are websites and it is documented how to play, most people learn to play from their classmates and their parents.

While this game is relatively old, they still play this game today in schools. Even though it isn’t as widespread as it was in the past. One of the reasons why this game is so popular is due to the fact that it is convenient to carry around and it would not be confiscated by the teachers if they are caught playing in school, unlike video games.